I'm building a new system for my dad and I ran into a snafu. I built the pc at my place and installed the OS. When I got it to his place, I put in the modem(he has dialup), floppy drive, and a dvd-rom. I powere d it on and it came up with a disk error. I tried reformatting and running again just in case the new hardware fudged it up a bit. I get the os installed again and it won't boot from the HDD, but if I leave the cd in the drive it will boot from the cd.

I tried a different IDE cable to no avail. Bios settings are all correct. I think it may be the mobo or bios because it hangs at the bios startup and drive detection screen forever. My celery 800mhz boots faster.

Now that I think of it I used a spare vid card here to load the os the first time and all was fine. I swapped it out for his at his place. Could that cause the problem?

Albatron KX18DS Pro
XP 2600 T-bred B (chip is fine it just came out of my system)
PQI 512 pc2700
Antec 350w PSU(came with the case)
Nvidia 8 meg pos vid card
Sony DVD rom
Samsung cd/rw
Floppy(unsure of brand)
Modem(unsure of brand)

I'm about ready to tear my hair out here. This is the first build I have had a problem I couldn't figure for sure.

Make sure the HDD's jumper is set to cable select, and that it's on the last connector of the IDE cable.

Also ensure that HDD-0 is your first boot device.

HDD-0 is the first boot device, the drive is the only one on the IDE cable and it's on the last connector. I have the jumper set to master, I'll try switching it to cable select later. Why would cable select make a difference? I thought master would be fine as well.

Not to sound like a smart @ss but is the molex plugged in correctly?

Yeah, the molex is in correctly. The HDD spins up when I power on the pc.

Edit: Tek was right about the jumper sorta. I had it set to master with slave. I changed it to single drive and BAM! no more problems. Me------>

Thanks for the suggestions guys.